One month in

One month later
Cindy and I can’t believe that we have been out for a month. It has gone by so fast and so slow at the same time. We both feel like we are just getting into the groove of traveling and are really enjoying it so far. Guatemala has been a pleasant surprise and there is so much to do here. Its super cheap and very easy to get around. Any one who is looking for a great vacation idea south of the border should look into it. Tomorrow we head to Ecuador. We have no special plans for the next 4 months other than a plane flight out of Argentina on the 2nd of January.
8/30 Back in Antigua
Our lives have been so busy that it has been a week since I last sat down to write. And what a week it has been. Chicken bus rides to Chichicastenango, Back to Antigua for a day, a nice bus to Honduras to see the ruins of Copan and then north to Flores to see the ruins of Tikal. Along the way was a great stop at Finca Ixobel, a working farm with offerings of river tubing, horseback riding (damn I hate those things), and caving adventures. More about that one later.
While we were at Lake Atitlalan, we ventured across the lake to the town of San Pedro. It was the hippie town before San Marco, but has since grown into a lightly annoying tourist town. While we were there, we decided to take a waling tour to a coffee plantation. Yes we are that starved for excitement. Our guide was named Juan. He was a small slightly build man in his early 30’s. His English was good and self taught. He claimed to have started one of the first Spanish language schools in the town and was in the lonely planet guide. I did not look him up. I gathered that San Pedro was a much smaller town only 3 years ago and all the hotels and eateries that saturated its waterfront were fairly new. Juan said that he did not teach much any more and led me to believe that the tourist office that we had booked through was his. I was called Bigfoot and he liked that we were from Bigfoot country. For some reason, I did not believe him but did not press him about his story.
As we walked, he told us a little about his life. He had always lived in the town and was cursed to have been born on an important Maya holiday. The curse for this date was not revealed until he was a young man of about 10 years of age. One day he had been walking by the water and felt an irresistible urge to enter the lake. He waded into the water and felt some sort of power or energy enters his body. Later walking home, he said that he did not feel right and felt some sort of pressure on his body. He went to his room but was unable to sleep. He felt so ill that in the middle of the night he got up to wake his mother believing that he was going to die. He pounded endlessly on the door to her room could not wake her. Juan told us that she was a light sleeper and that this had never happened before. Something strange was definitely going on. When she finally got up he told her how he felt but she would not believe him and sent him to his bed. She then fell into a deep slumber and had a vision of 3 Mayan priests who were now inhabiting the body of Juan. She was told that they would leave and that he would return to normal in a few days. She also was told that they would return at some point and that Juan might not survive a reoccurrence of this event. Juan never elaborated on this point. His mother woke and immediately rushed to his room to explain her vision and that she now believed that something was indeed wrong with him. His body was now inhabited with the spirits of the dead. She “of course” was a shaman and knew how to help him by giving him herbs and other medicines to cure him. Unfortunately the visitations have happened at least 3 other times in his life and sometimes could last up to a week long. During those times he would go into a deep depression and speak in tongues, and could feel the weight of the spirits pressing down on his body.
Juan was full of stories. He was sure that the ancient Mayans had been visited by extra-terrestrials, because they knew so much about astronomy. He explained to me that a man did not have cancer until a doctor told him that he did. It was only in the act of believing what a doctor said that a person actually got sick. But his best story was about the border dispute between his town and the neighboring town. Many years ago they had a disagreement about which town owned the volcano that sat between them. Both sides claimed that it was within their borders. An official from the government was called in to settle the dispute. The clever elders from San Pedro asked the official if the argument could be settled by looking for ancient property lines set out by the Mayans living there at the time. The Official agreed that if such evidence could be found, he would abide by it. Unknown to him, the San Pedro town elders had gone to the graveyard and removed the oldest tombstones that they could find. These were judged to be at least 300 years old. They then buried the stones in a line at various points on the other side of the volcano and covered them with dirt and leaves. The day of the search, they waited for hours before ‘stumbling’ upon them. The dispute was settled. Of course Juan was 1 of only about 3 people who knew the real story and no one from the other town has ever been the wiser.